Movie Review Christmas Bloody Christmas

Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022) 

Directed by Joe Begos

Written by Joe Begos 

Starring Riley Dandy, Sam Delich, Abraham Benrubi, Jonah Ray 

Release Date December 9th, 2022 

Published December 12th, 2022 

Christmas horror movies are really having a moment in 2022. Three high profile Christmas themed horror movies have been released to theaters in just the first two weeks of December. One of them is a high profile star affair, Violent Night, while another is an open ripoff of a famed children's franchise, The Mean One. The third Christmas themed horror of December 2022, however is by far the best of the trio. Christmas Bloody Christmas is a wildly over the top, high concept horror movie with high grade gore and sex to spare. 

Riley Dandy stars in Christmas Bloody Christmas as Tori Tooms, the ultimate cool chick. Tori owns a record store, loves heavy metal, and claims she can drink any man under the table. She's a manic pixie dream rock chick. I'm being sarcastic, but only a little. Riley Dandy is soooo good in this movie that she makes this dream girl into an awesome character. Did I absolutely go for this fantasy woman, yes, but only because Riley Dandy commits to the character so very deeply. 

It's Christmas Eve as our story begins and Tori is closing shop for the night on her killer retro record store. She's planning on hooking up with some guy on Tinder until her employee, Robbie (Sam Delich) convinces her to go out drinking with him instead. The banter between Tori and Robbie is charged, flirtatious, combative and quite funny. These two probably should not be hooking up under any circumstances, this would definitely be a mess the next day, but tonight, who knows. 

As the night kicks off, the pair drop by a toy store where two of their friends, a couple, Jay and Lahna (Jonah Ray and Dora Madison), are planning to have sex amid all the trappings of a toy store at Christmas. These many Christmas decorations include large amounts of fake snow, all the colored lights and stockings you would want and one creepy, animatronic Santa Claus. Unfortunately for all of these characters, this Santa does more than just repeat 'Merry Christmas.' 

In a backstory delivered by exposition TV News channel, we learn that these animatronic Santa's that have been delivered to toy stores across the country have been coming to life. It turns out, each was part of a failed experiment to create animatronic soldiers to be sent into violent conflicts. These unstoppable killing machines have, for some reason, been converted into Santa Claus robots and now, for unknown reasons, they've started to come to life and kill. 

That's the premise and from there unfolds a standard slasher film with Santa seeking and destroying anyone who gets his attention. Naturally, this includes our hero, Tori, and Robbie and whether or not they can survive Santa is the crux of the story. Naturally, this will include an inept response from local small town cops and no shortage of failed attempts to kill Santa followed by Santa making an improbable and terrifying comeback. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Empire of Light

Empire of Light (2022) 

Directed by Sam Mendes 

Written by Sam Mendes 

Starring Olivia Coleman, Michael Ward, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Tom Brooke 

Release Date December 9th, 2022 

Empire of Light stars Olivia Coleman as Hilary Small, a cinema employee in a seaside English town. Hilary's life is a drab routine of taking tickets and having sex with her married boss, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth), though he has no plans to leave his wife. Hilary's life is changed forever with the arrival of a new employee at the cinema. Stephen (Michael Ward) is a handsome young man whom Hilary instantly falls in lust with. However, since he's so young, she assumes he will have more interest in one of her younger co-workers. 

Much to her surprise, Michael takes to Hilary right away. The two have a terrific conversation which lead to Hilary showing Michael her favorite secret spot in the Cinema. The gorgeous art-deco cinema used to have more than 2 screens. A third screening area, which also included a dance floor and lounge, has been left to rot. Hilary likes to go there and smell the sea air from the lounge seats. It's also become a de-facto smoking spot for the employees. 

At first, the banter between Hilary and Stephen is just friendly but it soon takes on a flirtatious air. As their bond deepens via their conversations, Hilary gains the courage to stand up to Mr. Ellis and end their affair. This however, is a tenuous decision as Hilary harbors a dark secret. Mr. Ellis brought Hilary back after she had a mental breakdown a year ago. He's essentially her sponsor, the reason she's able to work and not be in a hospital. 

The burgeoning romance between Hilary and Michael is threatened as Hilary's mental illness returns to the fore and her relationship with Mr. Ellis sours further. Meanwhile, the cinema has earned a remarkable opportunity. The cinema will play host to the premiere of the movie Chariots of Fire, a film that went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1981. The premiere will be attended by celebrities and politicians and would be a huge boost for business. 

Meanwhile, in the background, racial issues are also coming to the fore. Hilary witnesses Michael being harassed by skinheads, his life threatened. Later, a race riot breaks out and Michael's life is once again placed in peril as is the cinema itself which gets caught up in the brief, violent white nationalist uprising. It seems that even society itself is conspiring to keep Michael and Hilary from being together. The dramatic crux then of Empire of Light is whether or not the central couple can overcome the personal and societal roadblocks in front of their unlikely romance. 

Olivia Coleman is a radiant actress of limitless talent. That said, the part of Hilary is a tad broad and leans into an actors worst instincts. Director Alan Ball allows a little too much room for Hilary's mental illness to be played broadly. A scene where Hilary has fully reached the end of her rope goes off the rails and Coleman's hysterics in the scene don't feel legitimate, they play like someone's broad idea of a mental breakdown. 

Hilary's mental illness and the raging racial tensions that also play throughout Empire of Light don't work well together. They feel like two different movies grated together. Then there is an overarching notion of the magic of the movies which has promise but never really gains momentum. A big part of the movie unfolds when Hilary actually takes the opportunity to watch a movie and has a very special experience. This feels completely apart from the rest of the movie as well. The choice of movie is perhaps meaningful, but the idea is underdeveloped. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Living

Living (2022) 

Directed by Oliver Hermanus 

Written by Kazuo Ishiguro 

Starring Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp, Tom Burke 

Release Date December 25th, 2022 

Published December 9th, 2022 

Living stars Bill Nighy as Mr. Williams. His name is kept very formal as a reflection of how he's lived his entire life by the standards of formality. Mr. Williams is the head of a non-descript Public Works office in a big English city, never identified. He's known among his employees as a quiet yet authoritative man. He manages the office efficiently, never makes waves and just tries to keep his part of this bureaucracy from gaining any kind of attention. 

Mr. Williams' arrival at work everyday is like clockwork, as is his end of the day routine. He rides the train to and from work but stays apart from his employees so as to maintain his authority. He appears to have done this job all his life without ever making much of any impact. Stacks of papers top every desk, each a request that Public Works kicks from one part of bureaucracy to another, as if their product were making sure nothing ever changes. 

Naturally, the life of Mr. Williams is about to change drastically. In an uncharacteristic moment, Mr. Williams rises from his desk one day and announces that he will be leaving early. We will come to find out that this is do to a doctor's appointment. At this appointment, Mr. Williams is told that he has maybe six months to live. The following day, Mr. Williams' clockwork arrival at work doesn't happen. He tells no one and simply doesn't show up. 

Instead, Mr. Williams has removed his life savings from his bank and has traveled to a seaside location in order to find someone who can teach him how to live. Encountering a drifter cum author, Mr. Sutherland (Tom Burke), Mr. Williams tries out a night of debauched partying and what happens from there will reveal a great deal about both Mr. Williams and Mr. Sutherland. This sequence is lovely and sad and brilliantly revealing. It's a bravura sequence in a terrific movie. 

Two more characters exist in this story and their story underlines the story of Mr. Williams. Alex Sharp plays Mr. Wakeling, a new man in Mr. Williams' department.  The name ,Mr. Wakeling, it's as if his name is intended to demonstrate that he lingers in the wake of others, carried along by the tide. Not a bad metaphor for a for a young man at the start of a new and confusing journey. Sharp gives Mr. Wakeling a wide-eyed eagerness that soon mellows into a healthy competence at his job and a general good nature. 

Mr. Wakeling stands out as he is immediately taken with a fellow co-worker, Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood). Miss Harris has also caught Mr. Williams' eye though it's not a creepy infatuation. Mr. Williams admires the life he's witnessed from Miss Harris, her positive attitude and warmth. She makes the office a little brighter and in her he sees someone else who might be able to help teach him what it is like to be alive after having spent so many years merely functioning. 

That's the magic of Living. Bill Nighy's performance is about learning to live and choosing the people who can guide you on that journey. It's a somber reminder of the ways you make an impression on people whether you are aware of it or not. Miss Harris made the world a little brighter without knowing she did it and, even from his cloistered space a functioning cog in a bureaucratic wheel, Mr. Williams noticed it, admired it, and comes to praise it with hopes of learning more from it. 

That's a beautiful idea and it is well explored in the patient and thoughtful direction of Oliver Hermanus and the insightful script of Kazuo Ishiguro. Hermanus adopts a look for Living early on that evokes 1950s Hollywood, and the work of director Nicholas Ray, that incredibly humanistic director, brilliantly known for his interior dramas. Like Ray, Hermanus uses interiors to reveal his characters. For instance, Mr. Williams' well dressed and mannered persona juxtaposed against the rowdy, grimy, seaside pubs, home to the debauched and delightful, Mr. Sutherland's of the world. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review The Mean One

The Mean One (2022) 

Directed by Steven LaMorte

Written by Steven LaMorte, Flip Kobler 

Starring Krystle Martin, David Howard Thornton, Chase Mullins 

Release Date December 9th, 2022 

Published December 8th, 2022 

The Mean One is a fully unauthorized horror parody of The Grinch that skirts the law by never actually saying the word 'Grinch.' How willing you are to accept this is a strong measure of how you will take this movie. The film takes the concept of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and turns The Grinch into a monster who accidentally murder's Cindy Lou's mom while he steals Christmas. Thus a begins a long term effort to destroy Christmas by killing anyone who exhibits even the faintest form of Christmas cheer. 

The Mean One, aka The Grinch, is played by Terrifier 2 star David Howard Thornton who essays yet another brilliantly physical and silent performance. He's a truly incredible physical performer, even as much of his performance in this very silly film is a parody of Jim Carrey's 2000's live action Grinch, crossed with a little bit of Art the Clown. It's mimicry but, at times, it's quite darkly funny mimicry. Thornton is the best thing about this very silly, extremely low budget horror flick. 

As mentioned, The Mean One proceeds from an accidental murder. Cindy Lou, played as an adult Krystle Martin, interrupts The Grinch as he is stealing Christmas. Her mother enters the scene to protect her daughter and accidentally dies. Years later, The Grinch has been stealing Christmas from this small town, and killing to do so, while Cindy and her father fled the town. Returning years later to sell their home, they find a town that has banned Christmas and harbors The Grinch as a deep dark secret. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review The Whale

The Whale (2022) 

Directed by Darren Aronofsky 

Written by Samuel D. Hunter 

Starring Brendan Fraser, Hong Chau, Sadie Sink, Samantha Morton 

Release Date December 9th, 2022 

Published December 7th, 2022 

One of the biggest anxieties in my life is having food on my face. It's a fear of humiliation, I get triggered by being embarrassed. Logically, intellectually, I know this is not something worthy of serious concern and that it is an unavoidable fact of life, food on your face is normal, wipe it off and move on. But, my brain won't let it be that simple. Thinking of this aspect of my anxiety has me triggered. My eyes are welling up and I can sense that if I linger further in this space, I will become quite inconsolable. 

I've rarely seen this type of emotional reaction, this type of triggered anxiety in a movie. It's quite difficult to capture this kind of internalized emotional struggle, the rigorous internal battle to stop yourself from crying over something not worthy of crying about. The Whale comes the closest I have seen in some time of seeing this kind of emotional turmoil, a roiling mass of embarrassment and shame, on screen. Brendan Fraser's Charlie captures this feeling in all of its internalized horror. If only the rest of the movie were capable of capturing anything remotely as genuine. 

Charlie is a dangerously obese man who gets by as a literature professor at an online college. The shame over his weight causes him to conduct his classes with his camera on, using only his voice to instruct his class. Charlie's only friend is his caregiver, Liz (Hong Chau). They were friends before she became his caregiver. In fact, Liz is intrinsically linked to Charlie's past. She was connected to Charlie's late boyfriend, a man whose death changed both of their lives. 

Throughout The Whale we will slowly unpack Charlie's backstory as a man who was once married and had a daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), who he would like to reconnect with. Charlie was pushed out of Ellie's life after he fell in love with one of his male students and embarked on a new life with this man. Ellie doesn't know that Charlie had wanted to be in her life but wasn't allowed to be. She only knows that he appeared to choose being with this man over being her dad and she harbors a deep, and justifiable resentment. 

Much of the plot of The Whale centers on Charlie trying to reconnect with Ellie before his weight problem, and his unwillingness to get help for it at a hospital, takes his life. Ellie, however, proves to be far more difficult to reconnect with than he imagined. Ellie's bitterness has hardened into an almost sociopathic cruelty. Despite Charlie's attempts at dressing up her cruelty as a kind of blunt curiosity, Ellie is rarely anything less than bitter to a toxic degree. 

This toxicity is explored in her relationship to a strange young man named Thomas (Ty Simpkins), who is insinuating himself into Charlie's life. Thomas claims to be a missionary from an extreme offshoot of Mormonism called New Life. He goes door to door with literature and, after meeting Charlie, and seeming to save his life, Thomas makes it his mission to save Charlie's soul before his weight kills him. Thomas is harboring a deep, dark secret that Ellie will spend some time drawing out of him. 

This is the portion of The Whale that is the most poorly developed. The idea appears to be to establish Ellie's empathy and care, qualities that she has worked hard to hide. How they choose to portray this is strange, misguided, and simply doesn't track with what we see on screen. In fact, it takes a late monologue from Charlie to explain that what Ellie did was kind and helpful. Realistically, it appeared she was trying once again to do something cruel, and it happened to turn out well. 

Find my full-length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review: Violent Night

Violent Night (2022) 

Directed by Tommy Wirkola 

Written by Pat Casey, Josh Miller

Starring David Harbour, John Leguizamo, Leah Brady, Alexis Louder

Release Date December 2nd, 2022 

Published December 2nd, 2022 

I've long had an aversion to Christmas themed horror movies. I'm a big fan of the innocence of Christmas. I love that I was part of maintaining my Goddaughter's belief in and love of Santa Claus which has continued long after many other kids lost their sense of magic. Santa Claus is sacred to me and thus I have a strong distaste for movies that score points on making Santa look bad. It's one of the rare places in popular culture where I become a pearl clutching media watchdog. I worry about little kids who might see Santa portrayed as a murderer and lose their sense of his magic. 

Thus, my initial reaction to hearing about the new movie Violent Night, was a pit in my stomach. Here is a completely mainstream movie that was set to place Santa Claus, played by Stranger Things star David Harbour, an actor beloved among a relatively young audience, in a bloody, violent, horror movie context. I was more than just skeptical of Violent Night, I was worried that it could be a watershed moment in the horror portrayal of Santa Claus. That makes this review a bit of a catharsis for me as my worries have been allayed by seeing the movie. Violent Night may place Santa in a violent and bloody story but at least he's the hero in this story. It's a little thing, but it made it easier to take and even enjoy. 

Violent Night introduces us to a Kris Kringle who has lost his smile. As we meet Santa on Christmas Eve, he's getting very, very drunk before heading out for his night of delivering presents to kids. Meanwhile, the gears of the story begin to turn as we meet the Lightstone family. Dad, Jason Lightstone (Alex Hassell), and mom, Linda (Alexis Louder), are spending Christmas together for the sake of their daughter, Trudy (Leah Brady). Mom and Dad have split up but Trudy is hopeful they can be reunited. In fact, mom and dad are at the center of Trudy's Christmas wish for her family to be whole again. 

The family is reuniting for one final Christmas with the uber-rich Lightstone family. Jason is planning to abandon the family business and has concocted a convoluted plan. Also attending the Lightstone family Christmas are Jason's greed addled sister, Alva (Edi Patterson), Alva's airhead, movie star boyfriend, Morgan Steele (Cam Gigandet), and Alva's influencer son Burt (Alexander Elliott. Overseeing the whole Christmas get together is the imperious mother of the Lightstone clan, Gertrude (Beverly D'Angelo), a corrupt businesswoman who may or may not have $300 million in cash stored in her basement. 

That would explain why the Lightstone Family Christmas is overtaken by terrorists led by Jimmy Martinez (John Leguizamo), codename Ebenezer Scrooge. Jimmy and his team infiltrated the family Christmas under the guise of caterers and are in place for a violent takeover once the family is all in the same room. What they don't know is that someone else is crashing Christmas, a drunk Kris Kringle is has dropped in and it's no surprise that Jimmy and his entire team are on Santa's naughty list. 

Read the complete review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Darby and the Dead

Darby and the Dead (2022) 

Directed by Silas Howard 

Written by Wenona Wilms, Becca Greene 

Starring Riele Downs, Auli'i Cravalho, Chosen Jacobs 

Release Date December 2nd, 2022 

Published November 30th, 2022 

Darby and the Dead posits the story of a child being able to speak to the dead as something non-traumatic. By the logic of this movie, Darby gained the gift of speaking to the dead following a near-death experience as a young child. That same day she also lost her mother though she didn't get to talk to her after death. Since that young age, Darby has made it her mission to help the dead move on to the afterlife by wrapping up their unfinished work on Earth. 

This entails talking to living family members and facilitating reconciliations or resolving disputes. A final goodbye or an I'm sorry or an I love you, is often all it takes to help the dead to their final resting place. But, what if someone dies and has no idea what their unfinished business on Earth is? That's the case for High School Queen Bee, Capri (Auli'i Cravalho) dies in truly stupid fashion while bullying Darby. As a ghost, Capri has no idea what her unfinished business is supposed to be. 

This means that she must convince Darby to help her, despite Capri having treated her poorly while she was alive. Her first idea is that she needs a spectacular Sweet 16 party. Capri is convinced that if she has an epic party in celebration of her that this will send her off to the afterlife. However, for Darby to pull this off, she will need to convince Capri's popular girl entourage, still mourning their Cheer Captain and friend, to throw this amazing party. 

Obviously, these popular girls are not about to listen to dorky Darby tell them to have a party for Capri. So, Capri sets about turning Darby into a popular girl. This includes a makeover montage and convincing Darby to become a cheerleader, something she used to do before her mother died. After a lot of convincing, involving annoying the heck out of Darby with insistent yakking, Darby agrees and the plot of Darby and the Dead works through the gears of teen movie clichés. 

Click here for my complete review of Darby of the Dead at Geeks.media

Documentary Review: Immediate Family

Immediate Family (2022) 

Directed by Denny Tedesco 

Written by Documentary 

Starring Danny Kortchmar, Leland Sklar, Russ Kunkel, Waddy Wachtel, Steve Postell 

Release Date Unknown

Debut DOCNYC 

Published November 18th, 2022 

One of my favorite concert experiences of recent memory was traveling to Milwaukee to see The Funk Brothers, the band of session musicians who played on nearly every song produced by Motown Records in the 1960s and early 70s. It was amazing, a terrific show. And I got to go backstage and shake hands with a man who played on every record that Stevie Wonder, The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, and The Supremes made at Motown. It inspires awe in me just thinking about the music history that man was a part of. It also says something that I don't remember his name. That's the thing about session players, they rarely received the credit they deserved when the record came out. 

The players that make up the similar touring session band, Immediate Family are among the few who can relate to The Funk Brothers. Immediate Family is comprised of the most in demand session players in 1970s Los Angles, another rich vein of wildly talented musicians capable of expanding on the sound of just about any performer. Danny Kortchmar, Leland Sklar, Russ Kunkel, Waddy Wachtel, and Steve Postell are not household names but if you love Jackson Browne, James Taylor, and Carole King, you can thank the Immediate Family for helping create their sound. 

The documentary Immediate Family is a lovely trip through the history of early 1970s music. Players such as Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Carole King had each explored being in bands and even had played together. But, with their songwriting prowess and their star making charisma, the call for them to become solo acts was made by record companies who saw the potential of them as individual superstars. Watching Immediate Family however, you will learn that they themselves never saw themselves as solo artists. They credited the Immediate Family band members for their success as much as any record company. 

The structure of the documentary is terrific as director Danny Tedesco cross cuts from recorded performances of some of the most famous songs of the early 1970s and in-studio modern recording of the members of Immediate Family playing the parts that they helped make into hits. Thus you hear Carole King's epic hit, I Feel the Earth Move and you get to see and hear Danny Kooth Kortchmar in perfect sync, play the part he played in the original recording. 

And the documentary proceeds like that with cool stories being told by the various session players and superstars involved and these beautifully edited scenes of these men playing with all of the timing and skill they exhibited as session superstars of the early 1970s all the way through the 1980s and to now where these session players have now carved out a niche playing the music they love together, for the first time, as an official band. 

My favorite of the many, many brilliant, funny, and eye opening stories about some of the greatest songs in music history comes from guitarist Waddy Wachtel. He relates a very fun story about how he essentially rescued the Steve Perry hit 'Oh Sherrie' by riffing out an iconic guitar solo. It's more fun hearing Wachtel relate the story, he's so much fun, I will only reiterate how amazing it is to think that that song would never have made number 1 on Billboard or remained a staple of classic pop radio to this day if Waddy Wachtel hadn't called an audible in the studio in 1984. 

Click here my for my review at Beat.Media

Movie Review The Son

The Son (2022) 

Directed by Florian Zeller 

Written by Florian Zeller, Christopher Hampton 

Starring Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby 

Release Date November 25th, 2022 

Published November 29th, 2022

The Son stars Hugh Jackman as business dad, Peter Miller. Peter is a business dad who does business things like staring pensively out of a window, wearing nice suits, and ignoring his family. Peter's business dad persona is shaken when his ex-wife, played by Laura Dern, turns up at his door one evening. The ex-wife, Kate, informs Business Dad Peter that their teenage son, Nicholas (Zen McGrath), whom Peter has dutifully ignored per the rules of being a Business Dad, has been skipping school and she can no longer keep track of him. 

Kate tells Business Dad that Nicholas wants to live with him and after consulting with his new wife, the brilliant, and completely wasted here, Vanessa Kirby, he agrees. Now he can truly be a Business Dad and ignore his son directly. No surprise then that Nicholas immediately begins skipping school again. New wife catches him hanging out in a park instead of going to school. Business Dad tries talking to his son and crying but it doesn't work, and Nicholas becomes ever more despondent until he attempts to kill himself because Business Dad is always business-ing.

Where director Florian Zeller made a genuinely thoughtful and insightful film about mental health and aging in The Father, he has crafted a dramatically inert and lacking in insight film in The Son. Hugh Jackman does his best cry acting since The Fountain and the result is a movie that even Laura Dern and Vanessa Kirby cannot lift to a level of being watchable. The problems are evident in a story that has nowhere to go. Business Dad is bad and wrong and should not be a Business Dad is the level of insight we get in The Son. 

It's all dad's fault that his son has severe mental health problems. It's his fault for working too much, for breaking the norms of society by, shock of shock, leaving his wife for a younger woman. He's wrong for being too rich and successful and for traveling too much. That's the surface level critiques that The Son appears to be lobbing at this Hugh Jackman character and his response is to cry or to sulk in his big corner office, staring wistfully out of high rise windows. 

Truly, I am trying to understand the purpose of The Son other than pure misery porn. The film crafts a character in Nicholas who has no way forward, he's a boulder rolling down hill toward tragedy. That's not a bad place to start with a character but the movie gives him no nuance, there is no insight into who Nicholas is or what drives him. The journey from introducing this unpleasant teenage child to the inevitable tragedy seemingly coming at the end is a series of miserable scenes that do explain why the kid is a trainwreck in progress but there is simply nothing else happening here. 

Attempts to give the movie something beyond Business Dad bad, sad teenager wants to die, involves introducing a character played by Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins plays Business Dad's own Business Dad, a true prick, a hateful, bitter man, who also happens to see right through Jackman's Business Dad. When Hopkins' character mocks Jackman's character for seeming to blame him for his failure as a father, it's cruel and lacking in empathy and self regard, and it is the single most honest moment in an otherwise  phony movie. 

Hopkins is unquestionably supposed to be a villain here and yet, he makes the character seem cruel but with a purpose. He's the first character who does something other than sulk, cry, or run to another room to avoid the drama. I don't want to say that Hopkins' openly cruel, arrogant, and bitter character is refreshing, but I am struggling to describe it as anything other than that when compared to everything else in this mind-numbing melodrama. 

How does a movie have the brilliant Vanessa Kirby and relegate her to leaving the room when the drama kicks in. Her character exists to be called away to check on a baby. That is until she gets shuffled offscreen permanently with the excuse that she needs to protect her baby from all the drama. This is not how you use your Vanessa Kirby. Kirby is a brilliant actress, having her constantly leaving the room to check on an unseen baby is a weird choice for how to use her. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review She Said

She Said (2022) 

Directed by Maria Schrader 

Written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz 

Starring Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, Patricia Clarkson 

Release Date November 18th, 2022 

Published November 23rd, 2022 

She Said takes cues from All the Presidents Men and Spotlight and turns a spotlight on the abuses that led to the #MeToo social media movement. The film stars Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as New York Times journalists Jodi Kanter and Megan Twohey who spent several months crossing the country, conducting interviews and uncovering information about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, a criminal, rapist, creep who is currently in jail for the crimes he committed. 

It's important to say that Weinstein is a convicted criminal as there are people who attempt to minimize what he did and brush away criticism of powerful men by hand waving sexual harassment as being a product of the time it was committed. It's a bizarre bit of mental gymnastics but there are numerous media figures who are willing to stand up for the Harvey Weinstein's of the world and excuse their behavior because these powerful men didn't know what they were doing was a crime. I

In the years before the Women's Rights movement and the increased representation of women in the workplace and in the halls of power, it was commonplace for powerful men to abuse women, to make demands of women sexually, and to go even further than that in forcing themselves onto unwilling women. By the logic of Harvey defenders, men of a certain age should be forgiven for their behavior because that's just how they grew up. Pro tip, if you think this way, you're part of the problem, you're wrong and please stay away from women. 

Part of the strength of She Said is how the movie demonstrates what these reporters were up against. They were battling not one villain, though Weinstein is undoubtedly a villain who occupies a large space in this story. No, they were battling an entire mindset. They were up against a culture that, at the time, treated terms like Casting Couch as a punchline. Women have been degraded for years by people who thought it was funny that a woman had been 'riding the casting couch' to get where they are. 

The behavior of Harvey Weinstein, aside from when it rose to the level of actual criminal behavior, was treated as normal. Asking a woman for a massage, asking women to remove their clothes, asking women to watch him take a shower, these actions were normalized and convincing the world that these behaviors were more than just wrong, they were worthy of punishment, was a massive boulder that these reporters were pushing up a steep hill. 

Then there were those who eagerly blamed the victims of people like Harvey Weinstein. She Said benefits from the use of names we recognize such as Rose McGowan, a victim of Harvey Weinstein who was degraded for speaking out when her assault actually happened. Here is a question for you, what made you think Rose McGowan wasn't telling the truth when she spoke about Harvey Weinstein assaulting her? What about her made her any less credible than any other person alleging an abuse of power? 

If you are planning a rebuttal to my question in the comments then ask yourself this, why do you know any of what you think you know about Rose McGowan? Why are you so invested in the idea that she may not be telling the truth? Why does it matter to you? You aren't Harvey Weinstein, you aren't his defense attorney. If you're wanting to turn this around and make this about me, ask yourself why you are so eager to argue about something with someone who also has no vested interest in what happened? Before you write your rebuttal, truly examine your life and perhaps consider moving on. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Bones and All

Bones and All (2022) 

Directed by Luca Guadagnino 

Written by David Kajganich 

Starring Taylor Russell, Timothee Chalamet, Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg 

Release Date November 18th, 2022 

Published November 28th, 2022 

Cannibalism, eating people. Bones and All follows a small subset of people who are cannibals but not by choice. Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell) was born a cannibal and, as we come to find out, she can't control this desire. Her father helped her manage it for a while and even kept her from realizing her true nature for a time. However, after she snacks on a friend from school, biting off her finger, Dad can't keep her hidden anymore and he's not sure that he should. After bundling her up and setting her up in a new home, he disappears. 

Left on her own, Maren has only a few dollars and a tape that her father made explaining the things that have happened that led to him leaving. He also pointed her in the direction of where her mother may be, somewhere in Minnesota. The film is set in the 1980s so no cellphones or internet, and this is a strong choice as a cellphone and internet access would undoubtedly undermine much of Bones and All. Maren's isolation and the few fellow cannibals she's able to meet in person would be less meaningful if she could join a supportive cannibal community on Facebook. 

The first cannibal that Maren meets is a true creep. Sully (Mark Rylance), upon meeting Maren, claims that he could smell her from more than a block away. The movie eventually explains that all cannibals are capable of smelling each other but it is an effectively creepy way to introduce Sully, who also talks about himself in the third person. Mark Rylance is an effective horror movie character. He suggests an art-house take on Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2's Chop Top. 

Maren does end up spending a night at a house that Sully has staked out. It happens to be the home of an elderly woman who is slowly dying on the floor of her upstairs bedroom while Sully is preparing game hens for dinner. He tells Maren that he feeds on people who he knows are dying, though that is an unsurprising lie. The two share a meal together, if you know what I mean, and then Maren runs off, frightened by Sully's creepy vibe. He's not gone though, unfortunately. 

At the next stop of her journey toward Minnesota and the mother she has never known, Maren meets Lee (Timothee Chalamet) after he disposes of a jerk at a store, and covers for her while she shoplifts. Maren uses her newfound sense of smell to determine that Lee is also a cannibal and since they are close in age, Maren feels comfortable getting to know him. This begins a tentative romance, though one troubled by their equal need to feed on human flesh. 

I am not sure I understand the point of Bones and All. The film has elements of a horror movie but it isn't scary. The film appears to be aimed as a teen romance but the romance is rather tepid. I can see the artfulness in the direction of Luca Guadagnino, he's a tremendous director. The production design, the evocation of the past without leaning too heavily on obvious signifiers, demonstrate his talent for time and place in his work. 

Click here for my full length review of Bones and All at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review White Noise

White Noise (2022) 

Directed by Noah Baumbach 

Written by Noah Baumbach 

Starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle 

Release Date November 25th, 2022

Published November 18th, 2022 

Netflix 

I've never read Don Delillo's much heralded 1985 novel, White Noise. Others have told me it is quite brilliant. I'm told it has a visionary quality that makes it quite worthy of being adapted at any time. From what I know about White Noise, Noah Baumbach, director of intimate dramas about awkward families and spiky characters, would not be the most likely choice to direct this material. The story carries elements of science fiction, high minded satire ala Joseph Heller, and a borderline unfilmable obsession with death. Unfilmable in that most audiences won't find the theme one they want to watch play out in a movie. 

It's rather perfect that an iconoclast like Baumbach would choose something so seemingly impossible as his first big budget directorial effort. It's also kind of perfect that he's taken millions of dollars of Netflix money and made an indie movie on a blockbuster budget. White Noise is filled with showy, dramatic speeches, and wildly strange moments of action fitting of a director of esoteric human drama. White Noise is filled with numerous themes but none of which seems to stand out or find any satisfying resolution.

Adam Driver stars in White Noise as J.A.K or Jack Gladney, father of 5 children from 4 marriages to five different women. His new wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), shares with Jack a despairing fear of death. What begins as a somewhat romantic, fatalistic conversation about how they can't live without each other and making the case that one should die before the other in order to save them from comparative states of horrific grief. 

Babette's fear of death manifests in her beginning to take an experimental drug that is supposed to relieve her of the fear of death. Instead, the drug just effects Babette's memory in general making her forgetful but still deeply in fear of death. For Jack, he expresses his fear of death through his work as a professor at the fictional College on the Hill, located somewhere in Ohio. Jack has earned fame in Academic circles for his intensive course, Hitler Studies, where he opines on the evils of the dictator and the culture that made him possible. 

At one point, White Noise comes to a complete halt for a dueling speech between Driver's Jack and his best friend, Professor Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle). In an incredible verbal dance, Jack and Murray each pontificate about the area of their expertise. Jack, of course, knows all about Hitler while Murray's unique field of study is Elvis Presley. The pair find strange and fascinating parallels between Hitler and the King of Rock N'Roll in each having attachment issues related to their mothers, their absent fathers, and their incredible ability to draw and compel a crowd. 

Neither Driver and Cheadler nor Jack and Murray are competing here. Rather, the pair is improvising a intricate dance of intellects that dovetail off of one another, building on each others points, coming to the point of interrupting each other but never seeming to steal the attention away. At one moment, Jack recedes into the crowd of gathering professors and students, mesmerized by their tete a tete and then he re-emerges in a different part of the crowd, rising from a crouch to take hold of the scene, and Murray steps back in awe to enjoy his fellow Professor's presentation. 

It's the best scene in White Noise and it is so good that I want to recommend the movie solely based on the quality of Driver and Cheadle's magnificent duet. I want to recommend it but I am not sure that I can. You see, what remains of White Noise following this bravura effort is far too strange, obtuse, and esoteric that I am not sure who the audience for this is meant to be. White Noise has director Baumbach tapping various styles from other directors from Altman to Wes Anderson to Mike Nicholas and Stanley Kubrick. The homage throughout White Noise is fascinating but I am not sure it adds up to anything in the end. 

I'm told that Delillo's novel actually thrives on trainwrecking the narrative into some inescapable place and leaping to a new narrative thread. White Noise, in fact, depicts an actual trainwreck that serves the purpose of shifting the narrative from quirky academic satire to an equally quirky survival thriller. The family is forced to flee from their home after a train is hit by a semi-truck carry flammable chemicals. The train was carrying toxic waste and the result is what the book and film call an 'Airborne Toxic Event.' Jack ends up being exposed to the Toxic Event and assumes that it is going to kill him but that is only used to underline his ongoing obsession with death. 

The Airborne Toxic Event portion of White Noise includes a chase scene and chaotic, end of the world preaching and then just peters out into the family returning home and going on with their lives. It's weirdly clever and provides yet another narrative trainwreck into another story, though slightly less successful than the actual trainwreck scene. The final act then becomes a domestic drama as Jack investigates Babette's experimental drug. I doubt that I can spoil the movie but I am nevertheless going to end my description there. 

White Noise is a particularly unsatisfying experience. On one hand, I love some of the ambition that Baumbach demonstrates. The stuff with Driver and Don Cheadle and Hitler and Elvis is genuinely riveting. Driver's performance is weird, as is Cheadle and Greta Gerwig's performances but they are entertainingly weird, they match the weird tone of White Noise. The acting is really first rate in terms of how it marries with the wild ideas of White Noise. That said, I can see where a more mainstream audience than myself, might be put off by the theatrics, the showiness, and the un-ironic bigness of these performances. 

I also love the film credits which encompasses the final scene of the movie to the very end of the last credit on screen. It's essentially a music video reminiscent of the wildly anarchic and inventive style of a Spike Jonze video. The lengthy choreographed sequence marries dancers and non-dancers a like in a series of coordinated movements that mimic and mock the daily mannered pleasantries of grocery stores in our obsessive consumer culture. Actual dancers glide amid the coordinated movements of shoppers, smiling, everyday consumers, going about the business of selecting their varieties of brands and filling carts to overflow with item after item. 

Consumer culture is among the many broad targets of White Noise though what point is being made about consumer culture is far too broad to determine. That really is the defining quality of the movie White Noise, it's a scattershot blast of vague commentary on modern life, some of it quite interesting and entertaining and quite a lot of it presented without much insight, humor, or meaning. I could excuse that as being just like life where not everything has a deeper meaning but that feels like a cop out by both me as a writer and critic and by the movie which appears incapable of settling on any kind of point. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Decision to Leave

Decision to Leave (2022)

Directed by Park Chan Wook 

Written by Park Chan Wook 

Starring Wei Tang, Park Hae Il, Lee Jung Hyung 

Release Date October 14th, 2022 

Published November 22nd, 2022 

To be released on MUBI in December, 2022

On the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast we had a moment involving the Chan Wook Park movie Oldboy that became part of our show lore. The premise of our show has me, a professional critic, my co-host Bob, a music critic, and our friend Josh, your everyday movie fan, talking about movies. We talk about all of the new movies of the week and a classic. Oldboy was chosen as our classic the same week that Spike Lee released his inferior remake. 

Myself and Bob were already huge fans of Oldboy while Josh had never seen it and knew nothing about it. As our conversation about the film progressed it slowly dawned on Bob and myself that Josh had missed an important plot point. There is a disturbing twist in the end of Oldboy and Josh had not picked up on it. Thus, to proceed with the conversation, we had to explain to Josh what the twist was and we did so delicately as to allow the twist to occur to him in real time. It's my favorite moment in the nearly 10 year history of the show. 

I only bring that up as an example of the subtlety and brilliance of director Park Chan Wook. Anyone could have missed the twist in Oldboy and still have enjoyed the movie as Josh did. It only deepened for him after we told him what he missed. Missed signals, misunderstandings, and the role of what we want to hear versus what we actually heard, each play a role in Park Chan Wook's new movie, Decision to Leave. This gorgeous looking murder mystery thrives in the thin margin between desire and truth. 

At the bottom of a mountain the body of a middle aged man is found. It appears to be an open and shut case, a climber falling from a significant height. Nevertheless, Detective Jang Hae Jung treats this like any other case, he will investigate it fully before he closing the case. Soon, what appears to be an open and shut case begins to take on new layers. Skin under the fingernails of the victim indicates perhaps they didn't fall but were pushed off of the mountain. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

The Menu

The Menu (2022) 

Directed by Mark Mylod

Written by Seth Reiss, Will Tracy 

Starring Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor Joy, Hong Chau, Nicholas Hoult 

Release Date November 18th, 2022 

Published November 18th, 2022 

Imagine Gordon Ramsey as a character written by Ari Aster and you get a sense of what The Menu is all about. Director Mark Mylod and screenwriters Seth Reiss and Will Tracy have given foodie culture a massive middle finger while honoring the humble food workers of the world from the celebrity Chef to the humble Soux Chef. A group of the fabled One-Percent are gathered at a high end experience restaurant on an island on the coast of a major city for what they think will be the high art equivalent of dinner. What they get is a severe comeuppance. 

Anya Taylor Joy is our entryway character, Margot, a young woman who received a last minute invitation to this high end dining experience. Her date, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), is a food snob and was desperately in need of a date after his girlfriend broke up with him. Margot has no interest in Tyler's food snob nonsense, and is barely tolerating his need to photograph his food and pontificate about the delicacy of Chef Slowik's (Ralph Fiennes) technique in crafting a food experience. According to Tyler, the entire menu is a story and you have to eat to the end to get it. 

There are only 12 guests at this restaurant which is located on a small island where the Chef and his staff live and cultivate all of their food, growing, raising, butchering, and serving food that is all sourced on the island. The cost of this dining experience is said by Tyler to be $12,000. per person. You get the pretentious attitude for free, thankfully. This particular dining experience is extra special as the diners have been specifically chosen and include Angel Investors, a Famous actor, played by John Leguizamo, and a famed food critic who helped Chef Slowik break into the big time in the world of Food Culture. 

Each of the guests on this night at the restaurant known as The Hawthorne have been hand selected. Except for one. That would be Margot and in the first few minutes of arriving at the restaurant, the Chef wants to know why she is here. Then he wants to know which side she is on, the workers or the diners. These questions escalate through the night as the Chef's plan comes more into focus and the fear and dread of the diners  radically vacillates from the whole experience being a theatrical presentation to the genuine fear that someone or, perhaps, everyone here is going to die. 

This builds to a final bravura moment that you will not be able to predict, a deconstructed classic of a desert with a visual flair that is audacious and darkly hilarious. I won't spoil it, I don't think I could, but I won't over explain it. It's just a phenomenal final scene and one I want you to experience for yourself. Some of The Menu doesn't quite land, it can be rather hamhanded at times in terms of the motivations of Chef Slowik or obtuse about the villainy of the diners, but those are minor complaints when compared to how great the ending of The Menu is. 

Anya Taylor Joy continues to make terrific decisions in the roles she chooses. She has unusual taste and that is well reflected in a filmography that carries few traditional choice and a variety of fascinating oddities like The Menu. Joy could very well have played one of the Kitchen staff or the main Chef as she carries an imperious quality that would fit with those characters Having chosen to play the most traditional audience surrogate available in this story she's equally winning. The script gives her a juicy secret to play with and the story centers on her in a very unique way. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Resurrection

Resurrection (2022) 

Directed by Andrew Semans 

Written by Andrew Semans 

Starring Rebecca Hall, Tim Roth, Grace Kaufman 

Release Date January 22nd, 2022 

Published November 16th, 2022 

Resurrection is not a movie you watch passively, it's a movie you recover from having watched. The 2022 horror thriller starring Rebecca Hall is an intense and thoroughly enthralling experience. And all of that is due to the remarkable performance of Rebecca Hall. Beginning the movie as a confident, independent business woman and single mother before slowly succumbing to the abuse she suffered as a teenager, Hall is breathtaking, delivering one of the best performances of 2022. 

Margaret (Hall) is a confident and successful woman with a corner office, a beautifully appointed apartment, and a teenage daughter who she loves dearly. We meet Margaret as she is counseling one of her subordinates who is going through a rough time with a boyfriend. Margaret is thoughtful, understanding and very helpful in her advice. It's clear, at this point, that Margaret may have some experience in dealing with abusive men, her advice comes from a place of hard won experience. 

This veneer of success however, along with a rather mundane routine of sleeping, jogging, working and sleeping with a married man, begins to be upended when Margaret encounters her former abuser, David (Tim Roth), at a work conference. She only sees him briefly but it is enough to trigger a significant breakdown and panic attack. This is just the beginning. Soon, Margaret begins seeing David in other unexpected but also very public places such as a department store and a local park. 

Deciding to confront David, he immediately starts pressing her buttons. He claims to be there with Benjamin whom we learn is the baby the two had together more than 20 years ago. This is not possible as Benjamin is dead and it's strongly implied that David killed the baby. If that were the only implication, Resurrection would be a very different movie. As it is, the revelations from this point on, I don't wish to spoil. You must have this experience for yourself. 

Resurrection is a disturbing movie. Writer-Director Andrew Semans has a strong command of the terrifying things that abusers do to their victims and some may find it hard to sit through just how disturbingly real David's machinations are, on top of the outlandish notes that Roth brings to the character. The gaslighting, the grooming, the separation of the victim from their support system, all of these are seen or referred to as part of Margaret's past with David. 

Click here for my review of Resurrection at Horror.Media. 

Movie Review Falling for Christmas

Falling for Christmas (2022) 

Directed by Janeen Damian 

Written by Jeff Bonnett, Ron Oliver 

Starring Lindsay Lohan, Chord Overstreet 

Release Date November 10th, 2022 

Netflix 

We all love a good comeback story. As much as our culture tears people down and enjoys a downfall from a massive height, we do love seeing someone bounce back. Lindsay Lohan certainly qualifies as someone who fell from great heights. After having become a major celebrity and a leading lady, she began a descent that was scrutinized and poked fun at for years on end. Battles in the tabloids with her family, public accounts of bad behavior and a series of truly awful movies, had left Lohan at the lowest of depths in popular culture. 

Then, Lindsay went away. Pulling herself out of limelight and getting healthy was the best news. After having a brush with becoming another Hollywood tragedy, Lindsay has seemingly been welcomed back to the Hollywood fold. The announcement of a two picture deal with Netflix was met with excitement and old friends and co-stars like Jamie Lee Curtis cheered her on. That comeback has begun and, before we talk about the movie, we should note that viewing numbers for Falling for Christmas are reportedly quite good. 

That bit of kindness out of the way, Falling for Christmas is a bad movie. It's not egregious or even unwatchable, but it's not good either. This incredibly basic holiday movie blends together elements of the Goldie Hawn comedy Overboard, a bit of It's a Wonderful Life, and the production design of every Lifetime Christmas movie to produce a most mediocre of modern Christmas movies. It's not Lindsay's fault, she has some spark here, but the whole of Falling For Christmas fails the returning star. 

Falling for Christmas stars Lohan as Sierra Belmont, a wannabe influencer and daughter of a very rich ski lodge owner, played by veteran Soap Opera star Jack Wagner. Sierra has come to her dad's lodge to try and get out of taking an actual job. She wants to be an influencer like her flamboyant, yes that is a code word, boyfriend Tad Fairchild (George Young) whose life is dedicated to selfies, trending, and brand deals. 

Here we have the first major misstep of Falling for Christmas. The movie has a very 50 year old man view of what an influencer is. The description is very much coming from a person who is upset that influencer is a job that people claim to have. The writing team does nothing to hide how they've only ever heard Boomer buzzwords about what an 'influencer' is and they are mad about it. Thus, the idea of Influencers is treated with boomer contempt for those damned kids. 

Read my complete review of Falling for Christmas at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Enola Holmes 2

Enola Holmes 2 (2022) 

Directed by Harry Bradbeer 

Written by Jack Thorne, Nancy Springer 

Starring Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, Louis Partridge, Helena Bonham Carter

Release Date October 27th, 2022 

Published November 14th, 2022 

Enola Holmes 2 is a consistent delight. Picking up from the breath of fresh air that was the first Enola Holmes feature, Enola Holmes 2 doesn't miss a beat in being fresh, funny, charming and thrilling. The stand out aspect of Enola Holmes 2 is, obviously, Enola Holmes herself played by Millie Bobby Brown. Brown could not be better cast as a quick witted, supremely intelligent, and capable detective hero. Brown's pluck and panache are the perfect qualities to complement a bubbly script underpinned by a genuine dedication to mystery. 

As we re-join our beloved hero, Enola Holmes, she has unsuccessfully hung out her own shingle as a detective for hire. Unfortunately, the ugly misogyny of the time makes it hard for Enola to find work. Soon she's forced to close her office due to the lack of clients. Then, a young girl wanders in in need of Enola's help. The sister of this young girl has gone missing and she wants Enola to find her. It's pretty clear that this child won't be able to pay for Enola's help but Enola jumps into help anyway. 

Running parallel to Enola's missing girl mystery, her big brother Sherlock (Henry Cavill) finds himself vexed by a series of financial crimes. Someone is robbing the rich and powerful via blackmail and they are also taunting Sherlock along the way. No points for guessing that Enola and Sherlock's cases will be crossing paths. How we get to that point is a terrifically fun ride. Driving the plot, even in limited screen time, is the corrupt Detective Grail (David Thewlis). A relentless and dangerous investigator, Grail goes to every length to keep Enola from the truth, right down to framing her for murder. 

Find my complete review of Enola Holmes 2 at Geeks.Media. 

Documentary Review The Computer Accent

The Computer Accent (2022) 

Directed by Riel Roch-Decter & Sebastian Pardo 

Written by Documentary

Starring YACHT 

Release Date October 21st, 2022 

Album Chain Tripping Released 2019

I have no idea what Chain Tripping means and neither does the band YACHT, though it is the name of their 2019 record. It's a pair of nonsense words mashed together and yet, Chain Tripping seems to fit perfectly the album it gives title to. When you listen to Chain Tripping and you find the groove that appeals to you, especially on tracks like Scatterhead, you feel like you are tripping and you could call it a chain as one song flows seamlessly into the next in an otherworldly rave. 

Chain Tripping is, as far as I know, the first and only fully A.I produced full length album. The band YACHT, an acronym that means Young Americans Challenging Technology, were looking for a challenge for their new album in 2019. Since lead singer Claire L. Evans is also an accomplished author whose most recent book chronicled the history of women in technology, futuristic ideas about artificial intelligence were certainly part of the band on a molecular level. 

As they began to look at making their next record, the band took a meeting at Google where a group of Google engineers happened to be working on technology intended to produce A.I generated music. With Google's work as baseline and the work of futurists and theorists in the field of A.I at their disposal, YACHT, which also includes Jona Bechtolt and Robert Kieswetter, began the painstaking process of making an album collaboration with Artificial Intelligence. 

The band then began a painstaking process for planning the record that would become, Chain Tripping. The first thing the band did was set some ground rules that would determine that the record fully came from their A.I collaborator. 

Rule 1 No adding notes, no adding harmonies, and no jamming 

Rule 2 The band could choose instruments, transform melodies, cut up melodies. 

These rules in place, the band set about breaking apart every song they'd created in their previous 17 years as a band and entered the songs into the A.I which would then use those elements of the YACHT catalogue to create a series of computer generated melodies that would be the base line of a song, essentially the instrumental for the record. Another rule the band created for themselves was that they were allowed to only use sounds that they could reproduce in live performance using some form of instrument. 

In one of the most fascinating aspects the documentary, The Computer Accent, we watch as Bechtolt and Kieswetter teach themselves these songs. It's a process that requires them to relearn how to play instruments they'd played all of their lives in order to re-produce the melodies generated by the A.I. In one incredibly telling instance, Bechtolt hears a computer generated melody that will require him to play the drums in a way that is counter-intuitive to the way most, if not all drummers, approach playing the drums. 

Similarly, lead singer Clair Evans had quite a challenge in mastering the A.I generated lyrics. In order to generate an albums' worth of lyrics from the standard of current A.I, the band needed to use not only their own back catalogue, but hundreds of songs from bands they'd admired and that had influenced the band members over the years. With the aid of technologist and poet Ross Goodwin, lyrics were generated and then Evans began a painstaking process of cutting the lyrics and rearranging them without changing the basic lines created by the A.I 

What Evans did is very similar to the process David Bowie used to write some of his most unusual and memorable lyrics. As detailed in the recent Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream, Bowie would cut lines from news paper and rearrange the lines into lyrics and that would become the basis for a song. Or Bowie would write a complete song and then cut his lyric sheets up and rearrange the line to create something completely different and yet the same. Bottom line, it's not easy to do and it's an incredibly revealing challenge for a songwriter. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Documentary Review Louis Armstrong Black and Blues

Louis Armstrong's Black and Blues (2022) 

Directed by Sacha Jenkins

Written by Documentary 

Starring Louis Armstrong, Wynton Marsalis 

Release Date October 28th, 2022 

Platform Apple TV 

Published October 27th, 2022 

At some point, the phrase 'Do you like Jazz?' became a cheesy signifier of pretension and oddity. Jazz is still wildly popular but it's settled into a niche that rarely breaks into mainstream success these days. Years ago however, that was not the case. Indeed, in the 40s and 50s, Jazz was fully in the mainstream. Much of that success could be attributed to the popularity of 'Satchmo' aka, Louis Armstrong. Arguably the greatest trumpet player of all time, Satchmo crossed racial lines and united fans of Jazz at a time when unity among white and black Americans was far from the norm. 

The new documentary, Louis Armstrong's Black and Blues chronicles the life and career of Louis Armstrong in a way no other Armstrong project has. For years, Armstrong wore a big brave smile and stayed above the fray of American politics. It was his effort to remain as popular among all audiences but it came with the cost of many Black Americans believing that Louis Armstrong was selling out Black people to secure his own success in mainstream America. Through never before heard private recordings we find out how Armstrong really felt about his success, the racial divide, and other notable aspects of his life. 

Louis Armstrong grew up in New Orleans and developed his talent for playing the trumpet at a very early age. As a teenager he honed his skills playing in brothels. But Armstrong was far too talented and too charismatic to go unnoticed. Eventually, Armstrong was brought on board with a touring band and his huge smile and brazen trumpet playing were the undeniable draw. By his mid-twenties, Satchmo had become a headliner, even in areas of white America and the south where the stage was the only place he was allowed to be because of his race. 

Among Armstrong's earliest challenges was navigating the mob. Having moved to Chicago in the late 20s and 30s, Armstrong was forced to cope with connected club owners and promoters who used intimidation tactics to get him on stages but used the same tactics to take larger portions of Armstrong's earnings from those gigs. Eventually, Armstrong was forced to choose between gangsters who set his schedule and took his money and settled on one who took the lowest amount of his earnings. 

Always a canny self-promoter, Armstrong turned to Hollywood to pick up paychecks and to spread his popularity as a singer and trumpet player. Word of mouth and recordings of his trumpet playing had made him a pretty big star but appearances on the big screen let Armstrong show off his winning smile, his innate charisma and a performance style unlike any other modern American musician. That voice, that gravelly, sad, yet joyous voice became as indelible and iconic as his legendary trumpet thanks to his appearances in movies that exposed his uniqueness to a wide audience. 

What director Sacha Jenkins captures in Louis Armstrong's Black and Blues is Armstrong's uncanny talent for self promotion and his private struggle with racial injustice. Even being, arguably, the biggest Black American star in the country did not rescue Armstrong from the indignities of racial intolerance. One notable story, related in the documentary features the voice of rapper Nas reading a private letter that Armstrong wrote to a friend about his experience on a Hollywood movie set. 

Click here for my full length review of Louis Armstrong's Black and Blues 

Documentary Review Gratitude Revealed

Gratitude Revealed (2022) 

Directed by Louie Schwartzberg 

Written by Documentary 

Starring Louie Schwartzberg, Norman Lear, Deepak Chopra 

Release Date November 1st, 2022 

Published October 29th, 2022 

Available via Streaming Rental apps and Amazon Prime 

Bewilderment is the holiest of holy feelings - Deepak Chopra in Gratitude Revealed 

I realize that being a person who quotes Deepak Chopra is a recognized identity that I don't have. And yet, here I am, having heard the famed thinker, Deepak Chopra say something that struck deeply with me and forced to quote it. This is a quote that crystalized for me something I have often felt but could never quite say. Confusion, for all the terror and uncertainty it may engender, is an opportunity. To be bewildered, to be lost in a moment is a chance to discover something or solve a problem. It's an opportunity to overcome something. 

I was wandering around in that thought for a while as I enjoyed director Louie Schwartzberg's wonderful documentary, Gratitude Revealed. That's where the Chopra quote comes from, this odd, beautiful, thoughtful and incredible documentary that is really like 30 some odd documentaries all in one. In Gratitude Revealed, the famed director of Fantastic Fungi trains his eye for detailed camerwork and depth of patience, on a group of individuals, creators, artists, musicians, thinkers, a man who is called a Freestyle Philosopher, and Norman Lear. 

It's a melange but a wonderfully realized melange. The mixture of people and idea ideas may seem unrelated, but they are, in fact, united in the idea of gratitude, of living a grateful life. Each in their own way has followed a path in life that they are grateful for. Whether it is a life of art, or music, or surfing or cooking, they're engaged in grateful acts each and every day they enact their passion. It's simple and inspiring and I could not get enough of it watching this documentary. 

Through this exploration of gratitude, you are invited to search your own life, your mind and find the ways in which you connect to the people on screen, the thoughts that connect you to the universe, the meaning you find is all your own and yet is universal, you are sharing this realization with millions of people, each in a different way. Every experience of life is just like that, a new opportunity to experience something. When you think of it like that, isn't life kind of great. It may seem cliche to look at each day like another opportunity, but it really is. You just have to decide what that opportunity is. 

Gratitude Revealed is what we should be teaching young children in school. Schwartzberg's curriculum is a series of experiences, a series of handshakes with different people who share a little of their experience that creates a connection through compassion. The man identified in the documentary as a Freestyle Philosopher and proves through his several soundbites to be just that, touches on something that Roger Ebert talked about years ago, how movies are machines that generate compassion. He is referring to the very documentary that he's appearing in as an example of cinema that generates compassion through the shared experience of other lives. 

Click here for my full length review of Gratitude Revealed at Geeks.Media.